Much has been written about London rapper Speech Debelle, the hip hop artist who recently won the Mercury Prize, beating off bookies’ favourites such as La Roux and well established acts like Kasabian to claim the prestigious £20,000 award.
Real name Corynne Elliot, she originally called herself Speech for over five years, but after being signed to her record label Big Dada, and discovering there was another rapper with the same name as her, she was forced to change it. Instead of changing it altogether however, she simply added Debelle to her name at the suggestion of her mother, as it was the name of her grandmother’s clothing line. Her debut album Speech Therapy, which had only sold 3,000 copies before winning the Mercury Prize (sales of which have now increased by 4000%), has been described as a South London hybrid of Lauryn Hill and Tracy Chapman, with its easy delivery of both lyrically nuanced and insightful material. On it she talks with refreshing honesty about her life experiences, particularly those gained in the turbulent years after the age of 19 when she moved out of home, and was forced to become more independent. “I was a spoilt brat so it was completely new to me to just, y’know, day to day looking after myself. I still had help, my mum didn’t stop helping me, but just to do things by myself… it was a different kind of experience from before”.
Speech was definitely one of the underdogs for the Mercury Prize – the odds of her winning started at 33/1 – and her win left many music fans disappointed that such a relative unknown had scooped the prize. When I ask her how confident she was of winning the Mercury Award, she answers matter-of-factly, “I was very confident I was going to win. The only thing I was confused about was why people seemed to be so shocked that I was confident I was going to win! That was the strangest thing for me, like why shouldn’t I be? It’s a competition and, y’know, if I was a runner doing the 100 metres and I was at the beginning of the line, then I’m gonna have to believe I’m going to win. Otherwise…what’s the point? You gotta get into that frame of mind and coming second or not winning wasn’t an option for me”. And as for how she felt when she did win? “ Relief. Relief because now things can continue the way I envision them to. Without the Mercury things would have not gone in the direction I needed them to, so there was relief that the wheels were in motion”. She laughs though, when I ask her what she’s going to do with the money. “That’s just a little bit of money in London if you’ve got rent…and I’ve got so many expenditures – I’ve got stylists, make up artists. It doesn’t go very far”.
The recognition and fame that is part and parcel of winning such a prestigious award must inevitably have changed her day-to-day life, but she seems relaxed about it. Though she seems unlikely to seek out fame, she is well aware of the symbiotic relationship most musicians have with fame, which is, in her opinion a “necessary” part of the job. “I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t have a problem with it at all – I think I should be more famous. I think I should be the equivalent of Lily Allen, and if not me then somebody like me. We need black stars”. As long as she remains famous for her music and not just for the sake of fame itself, she’s happy. She is clearly opinionated, though not in an annoyingly loudmouth way like the aforementioned Lily Allen; if she does achieve the same level of fame as Allen – and she should – it seems likely it will be for her music, and not her personal life.
Despite her relaxed demeanour, I wonder whether she feels having won the Mercury that there’s now a lot of pressure on her, or people waiting for her to trip up – bearing in mind the ‘curse’ of the Mercury Prize, which has seen most previous winners’ careers slow to a shuddering halt before they fade into obscurity. Speech may be more likely than the others to escape such a fate, given that her music is stylistically, radically different from the last five Mercury Prize winners, all of whom have been white male indie outfits.
She listens to a wide range of music, and her varied taste in music is evident on her album, with influences she cites as Tracy Chapman, DMX, Coldplay, and 2Pac. The majority of the lyrics on her album are very personal, but she says she’s willing to discuss all the subjects she talks about on the album because after all, as she puts it, “It’s the truth”. However, she seems to close up a little when I enquire about a specific song, Daddy’s Little Girl, the lyrics of which discuss her father abandoning her at the age of seven and are particularly raw. What, I ask, is her relationship with her dad like now. After a pause, she answers – “Same as it always was.” I get the feeling that this subject is too personal, and something that she’d rather not discuss with a complete stranger. Strangely enough, when I actually first met her, I was initially surprised – the frankness of her album lyrics is such that I’d somehow expected her to be just…bigger. Instead she’s wrapped up in a red tracksuit, sniffling because she’s got the flu as she gets ready to play the London date of her national tour.
She seems bemused by the media’s attempts to pigeonhole her, assigning her the role of a spokesperson for underprivileged black Londoners, or as Speech puts it portraying her as being “from down in the ‘ghetto’”- which, as she is eager to point out to me, “is just not my story at all. But I can understand people need to rationalise things”. She does, however, consider herself to be politically minded, saying the social commentary aspect of hip-hop is what she first found interesting about it. She is undecided about the state of British politics, initially saying change is good, before changing her mind, “Change just means a change. It doesn’t necessarily mean a change for the better, it just means things are slightly different”. She is however, completely certain as to what she would do if she were Prime Minister for a week – send out a national apology to everyone under the age of twenty for the recession, because she doesn’t think they’ve been in a position to contribute to it in any way. “Sometimes just apologising to people is good for people’s self esteem, it makes people feel better and I think that they deserve that’.
Speech is certainly self-assured, and in fact the only time she really seems to be at a loss for something to say is when I ask her who she admires in the public eye, outside of music. She thinks for some time, and I am not surprised that a woman who has spent the last 6 months in her life doing nothing but working on her career eventually answers: “Oprah Winfrey. Cos she’s rich”.
